Robotic rhapsody

NEW YORK -- Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny has spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about robots lately.

NEW YORK -- Jazz guitarist Pat Metheny has spent an inordinate amount of time thinking about robots lately.

Actually, that's putting it mildly: He has been downright obsessed with robots, and with getting them to do his bidding.

"I haven't slept more than four hours a night for six months now," he said one day last fall at a makeshift rehearsal space in a former Byzantine Catholic church in the New York borough of Brooklyn.

Metheny stood before a 14-foot-high, 35-foot-wide wall festooned with musical instruments -- an imposing, circuit-wired one-man band. The contraption itself seemed byzantine, and all the more so when it sprang to life in a mechanical whirl: beaters tapping cymbals, levers gliding over strings, mallets cascading across a vibraphone.

Metheny closed his eyes and hunched over his guitar, bringing a human touch to Expansion, the centerpiece tune of his new album, Orchestrion, released this week.

"This is something I've literally been dreaming about since I was 9," said Metheny, who, at 55, has three gold albums and 17 Grammys to his name.

Easily one of the most enterprising jazz musicians of his generation, he has worked in an array of settings -- from folk duos and bop trios to the heartland sprawl of the Pat Metheny Group.

But robots are a new wrinkle, and Metheny seemed eager to explain. He did so amid preparations for a tour that is to kick off Monday in Champagne, France, and conclude May 21-22 in New York.

Metheny, who grew up in Lee's Summit, Mo., traces his intrigue with musical automation to an antique player piano in the basement of his grandfather's house in Wisconsin.

Later he learned about orchestrions, the pneumatically driven mechanical orchestras that flourished during the 19th century, before commercial recording.

Metheny earnestly uses the word research to describe the music-making process. He said recording Orchestrion was especially valuable because it led him to new methods, a new frame of possibilities.

Each robot instrument is hair-trigger responsive to his signals and capable of a range of volume. The instruments receive their orders from Metheny's computer, on which he runs two software programs -- or, no less effectively, from his guitar or keyboard.

Steve Rodby, the bassist in the Pat Metheny Group and an associate producer of the album, said Orchestrion "is so much more about Pat than it is about the robots. It has this intrinsic liveliness -- I almost said 'lifelike quality' -- that comes from the fact that it's not sampled instruments. It's real sound in the air, and Pat's in there improvising."

In that sense, the live Orchestrion experience is bound to overshadow the album, provided Metheny's road crew can sustain transporting 8 1/2 tons of equipment from city to city.